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Alex Leese Goes Home

March 19, 2018

Photographer Alexandra Leese returns home in her new series, Boys of Hong Kong. After moving from Hong Kong to London at age 11, Leese's innate fondness for Hong Kong and its culture became tainted by Western prejudice.

However, Boys of Hong Kong is her act of rebellion, and in rediscovering the city she was raised in, Leese is able to rise above that learned prejudice. Also at the heart of her series, Leese looks at the way in which masculinity, particularly Asian masculinity, is portrayed in the arts.

We spoke with the photographer about her perspective-altering project, which she debuted this past weekend with a display at London's Red Gallery.

Having lived in London now for most of my adult life, my idea came about through a desire to return to my hometown of Hong Kong and rediscover it with fresh eyes. I was particularly interested in seeing what the Youth Culture was like, and without a solid plan I returned home and explored. Allowing the project to take on its own voice through the people I met and places I went.

I soon discovered an emerging youth culture, and many of them embracing individuality, something that tended not to be encouraged when I was growing up there. Inspired by this and the boys I met the project grew into something fascinating with each boy and each place I visited.

It became an insight into the lives of these boys, and of this generation in Hong Kong. An intimate portrait series mostly shot within their homes or places they would take me where they felt most themselves. This project aims to explore a diverse range of Asian masculinity and beauty. Breaking down stereotypes not only put on them from the West but within their own culture as well. A topic I feel is important to open a dialogue on. It’s also very much a celebration of these boys and of Hong Kong as a city.

As someone who was raised in Hong Kong, what aspects of the city were you trying to capture in the series?

I wanted to show the world how beautiful Asian men are, and to celebrate this! Quite often, in the West, Asian men are not seen as attractive. I wanted to counter this prejudice by creating and showing a set of portraits that celebrates an incredible range of masculine beauty, from my amazing hometown.

What are some brands you’re excited about right now?

ASAI– his work is such a breath of fresh air! He manages to take influence from his Chinese and Vietnamese background in a way that feels totally unique without falling into any traps of cultural appropriation. It’s beautiful in colour, texture, and shape. It can be high end and youthful at the same time. He’s a very intelligent designer!

How did you get your start in photography?

I went to Chelsea Art College after school to pursue a career as a painter, and while I was there my tutor pointed out that I had an eye for photography. I changed my direction, went to London College of Fashion, and now I work as a fashion and portrait photographer.

As so much of photography has turned to being shared online, what do you think is the importance of having physical photographs?

I think online platforms are very important to showcase and promote work, and to allow people to view art where access might be limited. But it is only one way to view art…. Without sounding too cheesy, Art deserves to be viewed in both the physical and digital world. So much of what makes art beautiful is what you can physically feel, see, hear, touch or smell. You can lose a lot of this experience through only viewing art online.

John Giorno: We Gave A Party for the Gods

November 19, 2018

Visiting John Giorno is like dropping in on an eccentric great uncle. He welcomes you with a kind grin, offering tea before settling into his armchair, stray rolling papers and a little hill of crumbled pot left out on the table beside him. His place is something of New York lore—a 19th Century-era former YMCA on the Bowery that he’s inhabited since the ‘60s, its lofts decorated with motley antiques and heirlooms, the preserved belongings of tenants past, and Giorno’s own colorful artworks.

Known for his poetry, John has spent his adult life testing different manifestations of the form, working in experimental verse and performance, silkscreening his words on canvas, even devising a system for callers to hear poems spoken over the phone on demand.

From his decades of experience, and thanks to a colorfast memory, John has stories in endless supply. Stories about a childhood surgery that could have cost him an eye, but instead led to his first whiff of fame. Stories of ditching Wall Street to pursue art. Stories featuring the creative deities he has counted as lovers, friends and collaborators, figures like Rauschenberg, Warhol and Burroughs.

Sitting comfortably upright in his chair, he recalls the many highs and lows of his past with fond acceptance, a product of his longtime devotion to Tibetan Buddhism and its philosophy of acquiescence: Go with the natural order of things.Welcome the good as it arrives, let it as it leaves. Even into his eighties, Giorno exudes a sort of preternatural calm, particularly when considering that which others might find tragic, from the death of a dear friend, to the metamorphosis of his artform into something beyond recognition.

Let me ask about your name. Someone once told me that there’s something uniquely satisfying about the sound of Italian artists’ names: John Baldessari, Vito Acconci...Have you ever considered the sonic qualities of your own name?

Well, I like the sound of it. Occasionally I do a first-person character, like this last poem I wrote, Who Is John Giorno? But it is just a voice. It’s just an ‘I,’ but sometimes I change it into ‘we,’ or ‘you,’ or ‘you’ being ‘me.’ When it works, ‘you’ is ‘me.’ [laughs]

Do you come from a long line of Giorno’s?

My four grandparents were Italian. Half of them were from Northern Italy, and then my father’s family were from Southern Italy, the province of Basilicata. South of Rome, all the way down to the sea down there. My father Giovanni Giorno, when he arrived here in the 1880s he changed his name to John Giorno. He was a tailor. He became quite rich—he had his offices up on 34th Street, facing Lord & Taylor.

Where did you grow up?

I was born in Brooklyn, and my parents moved to Roslyn Heights, Long Island in 1954. I grew up there, and went to Columbia College. You know, it’s more interesting than that—so my grandfather meets my grandmother here, downtown, in Little Italy, in 1888 I think. They get married, and then they move up to Harlem in 1893, then have five children, then move to Madison Avenue and 114th Street, and then they move to Brooklyn in 1905, to Bay Ridge, which was the suburbs. Then my parents, in 1932, moved to Marine Park, which was the next suburb. Then they moved to Roslyn Heights, which was the ultimate suburb. I couldn’t wait to run away from Long Island and come here! I’ve been in this building for 52 years.

There’s a phrase you use on one of your famous silkscreens, NOTHING RECEDES LIKE SUCCESS. I wonder when you had your first taste of success, as a poet or otherwise.

Well there’s never one moment, but you have many moments that are important, whether you think they are or not. In terms of being successful, as in worldly success, it happened to me many times as a poet, even in the very early ‘60s. I was doing something with found poetry that nobody did, so I became famous, with Ted Berrigan and the Lower East Side poets, C magazine and that whole St. Marks world. And even before that, I was the star of Andy Warhol’s Sleep.

So you’d felt that fame.

Well much earlier something interesting happened. When I was 9 years old, I had a tumor between my optic nerve and my brain. It was 1945, and my family found a great doctor on Park Avenue, Dr. Algernon Reese. He invented a new operation of cutting away the bone, they had invented all these electric saws during World War II. Normally they’d just cut out your eye to get the tumor out, and then you’d be blind. So they did the new operation on me for the first time, when I was 9. It was a great success, and eventually they presented me at the Pierre Hotel, the American Medical Association. You know, it was “Stand here,” and then they would walk me to another room, and then “Stand here.” Suddenly I got taken on to this platform, and there were fifty of these photographers with movie star cameras! You know, the flash bulbs, it the same as they used with the movie stars. They all started flashing, and this was thrilling! I said, “This is what it’s like to be a movie star!” It lasted for just a minute, because they didn’t want to stress me out, and I was saying to myself, “No, I want more!” I walked out and I thought to myself, But I’m not a movie star, and this is never going to happen to me again.

So you took to the attention.

Well that’s something even more curious, not more than a year later a neighbor, through an uncle, got tickets to the Howdy Doody show. I was 10, and again it was this procedure, getting there two hours early, and it was a question and answer segment, we were going to answer questions together. We go out together, and there was this vast audience and all these lights. I get stunned, and I kind of like it! And then all of a sudden they’re asking these questions, but I’m just fascinated with these lights, and all these people. An audience is very powerful. So that was my first taste of an audience. So they ask some questions, and I say “...what?!” I’ve spent all my life performing, but that was a taste of an audience that shocked me. I find all these things curious.

So then around the ‘50s and ‘60s there was this popular West Coast school of poets, Ferlinghetti and Ginsberg and these guys, but you’re so tied to the East Coast, to the New York school. What drew some poets to the west versus the east, and what differed in the style of those two schools? Was it political? Was it the climate?

It was all those things. There’s a certain feeling of mind in California, so Ferlinghetti and Michael McClure, Joanne Kyger, Diane di Prima were all from that. And then East Coast was William Burroughs, and Allen Ginsberg was also a force here, and the art world—so it’s a different world here. I got endlessly invited to California, but I wasn’t drawn there, not at all.

But you didn’t have that wanderlust?

Well see, I went to India, every year or two, sometimes for a year. I always kept this place, and then William Burroughs moved into the [downstairs] bunker in ’74 or ’75. And then all my lovers were from New York. So there was always a reason.

Do you believe in sort of spiritual auras, that sort of thing? Does a space like this absorb its inhabitants?

I think it does. The people who were here, there’s a residue of their energy. But that’s like consciousness, when it dies it vanishes. So in these three lofts there’s very much the feeling of things that happened, but that’s very impermanent. It’s like a grave. Remembering is the function of mind, and you see things externally but the external does not have a mind, it is a projection of your mind. So it’s one of those oxymorons, everybody has this feeling sometimes of an aura or a residue, but there’s no consciousness, it’s unsolvable.

Poetry has changed its skin, and you can’t yet see what the new skin is.

In one of your pieces about Burroughs, you speak about absorbing his consciousness as he died—as a poet, do you think that’s something that you’re especially inclined to do, absorb those around you, and maybe speak with their voices?

As a poet, yes, but it was more to do with being a Tibetan Buddhist, it’s a meditation technique that is used to leave your body, ejecting your consciousness through your central nervous system out the top of your head. You can be assisted by a lama, and I’ve done that practice for years, so when he died I did it, as part of a longer meditation. When I did it I was really surprised, because it’s a physical thing, and you’re like “Oh my God!” But you don’t think about that for a second, because you’re doing something so special, you don’t get discursive about it.

At what age did your turn to Buddhism occur?

I went to Columbia College, and I always had a propensity, I took some of those courses. Philosophy courses, and Buddhism—they called it oriental religion. But there was no place to meditate, the zen center on Park Avenue was not where it was going. Taking LSD in ’64 and ’65, when you have a good trip, it’s a good trip. When you have a bad trip, it’s your mind, it’s not the drug. So you follow that train of thought, and you turn to meditation, and it works a little bit, and then you realize that that’s a possibility. So that drew me towards Tibetan Buddhism, which was just appearing here. I met a few people over the years, and I didn’t get to go to India until ’71.

What was the scene like at Columbia at that time? You talk about experimenting with drugs, is that something that was happening on campus?

Well I went to Columbia ’54 to ’58, so that was before drugs. Marijuana and Benzedrine, those were the only drugs we had.

I was talking on the telephone one morning in 1968, and I was crashing from some drug and had a hangover, and this person was really irritating me. I was hearing all of these stupid words, and suddenly I thought—this could be poetry, if it weren’t for this asshole.

But was school somewhat progressive, and culturally liberated?

It’s a complicated question—I hated Columbia, because everyone going there just wanted to become doctors, lawyers, bankers or whatever, and then move out to the suburbs, to where my parents were living. I would say to myself, “Don’t they know?!” On the other side of it though, that was the generation of really great teachers Mark Van Doren, Eric Bentley, Lionel Trilling—so I had the greatest teachers in the world. That was a great moment for me there, as a poet. They all had a profound effect on me. I got there through a high school in Brooklyn called James Madison, where I had equally as brilliant teachers. I was taught everything in high school, up to ’54, up to Beckett or whatever it was. So the teachers were really great.

But was the focus of your studies around philosophy?

No, it was English and creative writing.

So you graduate, and then what did the next couple months look like for you?

I went to Iowa Writers Workshop for about four months, didn’t like it so came back here. It got a little too crazy so my parents insisted—or, suggested—that I get a job. I was out in Long Island at this house, it was beautiful, it was great, I was just sort of cocooning, so to speak. But I understood the problem, I couldn’t stay there, and it seemed easy to go to Wall Street. It was ’59, and I went down to a brokerage house called Fahnestock, worked there for a year and a half. It was really rough down there, but it was also a gentlemen’s club, so it was easy. I faked it for a year, and I could’ve gone on, but I wasn’t good at it because I didn’t like it. So I quit, and my parents gave me back my allowance. Their allowance paid the rent here, it was very cheap in 1966.

So, a brokerage house is no place for a poet—who were the first people that gave you the sense of an artistic community?

Well even at Columbia, there was the West End Bar, which was a bunch of outcasts who went to Columbia College, Vietnam vets and alcoholics like I was, so we drank there, and then I turned a little bit to going downtown, Cedar Bar and the White Horse. It sort of started in ’61, by ’62 I was in this art world. By ’62 I went to every show, because they were all friends. I didn’t meet Andy until November of ’62, but I saw him at all these openings, because everyone was having their first show, Jim Rosenquist, Roy Lichtenstein, part of this scene that was very much connected to St. Mark’s Church, this scene around the second generation New York school of poets. Ted Berrigan, and that group of poets were my peer group.

So that scene provided an education beyond your formal education—to what extent did romances and friendships in that scene nurture you or develop you as an artist?

The people that interested [me] more were the artists, as friends. I mean Andy was one, and later in ’66 Bob Rauschenberg, and later Jasper Johns. I knew them during all of this, so there were these two worlds that were sort of together. The poets are very old fashioned, even though the New York School was modernism—they all liked me so I liked them, so they’d include me in their magazines, and we’d perform together—but they were very conservative. And then you had the beats, who also, nobody realizes, were also very conservative, they were lyrical poets, like 19th century lyrical poets taken up to date, like Allen Ginsberg, using the vocabulary of the 1960s but there was still the formality. And I’m not a lyrical poet, nor am I a modernist. So then on the other side there were all these artist friends, and they were all an enormous influence. You just watched what they did, be it Bob Rauschenberg, or Andy, or whoever—they just work all the time, and they do these things, whatever comes to mind, they follow that thought to completion. If it’s good, then suddenly they have this thing, and if it’s bad, they let go of it. So I did the same, and that’s what gave rise to my life. That’s how Dial-A-Poem started in ’68, or the performances in ’65 with the LP records. I just did what the artists did, if it seems like a good idea—and it’s not easy—go with it. Whereas the poets don’t like doing that, so then my path sort of went a slightly different way. And William Burroughs, who stayed a very good friend until he died, he was living downstairs so I was very much a part of the literary world also, performing with him, and then performing in the poetry world.

It sounds like it benefited you greatly to be able to straddle these different facets of art. So you’re writing down your poems, you’re performing them vocally, maybe recording them to records. At what point did you have the inspiration to commit phrases and words to canvas or silkscreen, and make more of an art object?

Well the first ones I did were in in ’68, and that had to do with the influence of these guys. One day, it was during the anti-Vietnam protests. Peter Orlovsky came here, we were silkscreening T-shirts of my anti-war poems, on white T-shirts. We did hundreds here, out the door, hanging them on the staircase, going all the way down. And there were those fumes, we got incredibly high just breathing, and I said “I know how to do this now!” So I started with black-on-black rectangles, I did a couple that year, and I continued every year doing something, as a part of the concept that I had in 1965, and the beginning of Giorno Poetry Systems. It was working with many venues that come out of being a poet— performance being one of the venues, and Dial-A-Poem being another of the venues, and LP records being a venue.

And obviously art was another venue. I was a part of the art world back then, because of having these lovers, but I never pretended to be an artist. I’m a poet. Because I saw instantly, the difficulty and the politics of wanting to succeed in that world, which is based on commodity and huge amounts of money. So my art stayed on sort of a low level during the ‘60s and ‘70s, I did shows mostly in Europe, and it wasn’t until the late ‘90s and for the last 25 years that I have had many gallery shows in New York. For me what’s wonderful about that is that it’s become a real venue for my poetry. The paintings, watercolors, and drawings are just an extension of it—exactly the same as my performance. Because paintings and drawings require so much skill, the skill to be able to do them is sort of equal to performance.

What were some of the periods of great conflict over the course of your career?

Well because of Sleep, I became a little famous, so that’s already something that everybody hates. Then I went on to Dial-A-Poem at MoMA, which was hugely successful for three years, I was in Life magazine, and Newsweek, and Time.

Tell us how Dial-A-Poem came about.

Well, I was talking on the telephone one morning in 1968, and I was crashing from some drug and had a hangover, and this person was really irritating me. I was hearing all of these stupid words, and suddenly I thought—this could be poetry, if it weren’t for this asshole... That stuck in my head, and then a few months later, in April, I got asked by the Architectural League of New York, they had a gallery space in the American Federation of the Arts building, they said “Do you have an art project?”And I said, “Yes, I do! ”That was Dial-A-Poem. What’s interesting is that I was the first person who connected the telephone technology with publicity, and content. It was immediately copied by everybody, even Don Rickles did Dial-A-Joke. It was all based on publicity, because any time I was in a magazine, the phone would ring off the hook.

It definitely seems prescient. Are there any contemporary technologies that inspire or entice you at all?

Well now you can get one telephone line and it connects to 10,000 calls. I never got into contemporary technology because I’m 81, you know, I don’t understand exactly what’s happening. But we chose the best 200 poems from Dial-A-Poem, and these people who called randomly got one of these poems. So we’ve done that in a few major cities recently, but it’s not the level of energy that I brought originally, to create the whole thing myself. Then we do some artworks, I have this telephone and there’s a small computer in the telephone, so you pick up the telephone and get a dial tone, and as soon as you touch it you get one of these poems. Now social media has changed everything, so I don’t need to do that, another world exists. This has been a golden age for poetry, this last 50 years, and technology is one of the reasons, unlike it’s ever been in the history of the world.

There are so many lamentations nowadays that social media and the nature of the modern news cycle has led to a dilution of language, but that runs in contrast to the concept you’ve brought up that poetry can’t be killed.

Exactly, it just means it’s a very fresh moment. Just because the New York school can’t propagate itself, it dies a natural death. But people are using words in such an obsessive way now, that you don’t even know what’s happening with poetry. Poetry has changed its skin, and you can’t yet see what the new skin is. But words are so a part of our culture and our minds, as they never were before, that it’s inexplicable. It’s not just like reading the newspaper 50 years ago, 100 years ago. So it’s great.

So many of the artists that you’ve counted as friends, colleagues, lovers, have died over the years. I wonder, especially considering your relationship with Buddhism and the acceptance of death, how these losses have changed you and your work.

From a Buddhist point of view, I let it come, let it go. I’ve got a really good memory, and I remember clearly what happened 30 years ago, 40 years ago. So there’s no nostalgia. And each one of them was a great benefit, or help, or a blessing for me, but if they’re dead, they’re gone.

Along with that frame of mind, you’ve mentioned that you won’t fear death, when it comes for you.

Well, it’s easy for me to say that. [laughs] But I’m not sure, I’m a Buddhist meditator, I meditate every day and I work with my mind. When you’re 81, you’re prepared, death is nearer than you want. So I feel very confident in doing meditation practices, but who knows, at the moment. At least I won’t be as terrified as a completely ordinary person. The religions, Catholicism, Judaism, they don’t prepare you for much. But meditation, in any tradition, where you’re working with your mind in a real way, should help. Death— that’s the next big thing I have to do. [laughs]

A.P.C. BAM BAM

November 16, 2018

For the last two years, French brand A.P.C. has hosted one of the world's best parties—their infamous BAM BAM party—in cities like Paris, Tokyo, London and Hong Kong. Now, the label has finally brought BAM BAM to New York.

At China Chalet earlier this week, some of New York's freshest faces gathered to drink, party and dance to music spun by singer Kilo Kish, designer Olympia Le-Tan, SelectorGT and A.P.C. founder, Jean Touitou and his wife, Judith, until well into early morning the next day.

A brand known for its soft and minimal femininity, A.P.C.'s BAM BAM parties are anything but. They're wild, loud and unchained—and office wouldn't have it any other way.

Emily Ratajkowski Gets Radical

November 08, 2018

You know Emily Ratajkowski. You’ve seen her, first grinding her way through the “Blurred Lines” video, and since, in her thong on Instagram or bra-less at the Kavanaugh hearings—the latter about which, everyone had a comment to make. Somehow, the model-turned-actress has become the polarizing face of feminism in the fashion industry.

But when I sit down with the 27-year-old, her philosophy about politics seems pretty simple to me: all women should be able to do whatever the fuck they want, as long as it makes them happy.

For Ratajkowski, sometimes that means wearing no bra; other times, it means wearing sweatpants. The point is, for her, being radical is just about being Emily. Just don’t tell her to call her senator.

As an outspoken political voice for our generation, Ratajkowski doesn’t believe in subtle acts of defiance. She wants to work outside the system to quickly burn it down. And we’re more than ready to join her.

With a new movie out later this month, office sat down with the model to talk about everything from feminism to that famous arrest photo. Read our interview, below.

You have a new movie, Welcome Home, coming out next week. Do you want to tell me about it?

Yeah! It’s really my first lead role—it’s a thriller with Aaron Paul from Breaking Bad. It’s about the idea of privacy and voyeurism in general, and it’s something I’m really proud of. I actually haven’t seen the movie in a minute, but at the very least, I know I feel good about my performance. That’s a really nice feeling, especially since you can’t control the rest of the film. The only thing you can hope for is that you like your performance in the end result.

Since this was your first real leading role, were you at all nervous?

Not really. I mean, I started acting before I was ever interested in modeling. Growing up, I was a total theater nerd—I just lived and breathed acting—and then like someone told my parents, ‘She should try modeling. It’s a good way to get her foot in the door.’ Of course, my mom was like, ‘Fuck no,’ but I eventually went to LA and got signed to an agency. Modeling just happened to take off first.

So, being a model was never your real goal.

No, it was never the goal. I come from a creative family, and I was going to UCLA for visual arts before I dropped out to do this. So, I guess the creative fulfillment that comes with acting takes away the pressure of the actual job, because, for me, it’s so enjoyable.

You said you think a lot about voyeurism. In some ways, its part of your own experience because so many people look at so many aspects of your life. I mean, you have Instagram and other social media, which allows you to curate what you want to let people in on—

I look at it a lot like a blog, you know? I’m not posting in real time, I’m not posting what I’m doing for dinner. Honestly, I don’t even like to post people that I’m close to, because why would I expose them to that? It just doesn’t seem fair. It’s one thing for it to be my job, but it’s another for them to be sucked into that crazy world of judgement. But that being said, I’ve really never had an issue with that—I mean, of course, there’s a lot of privacy you give up and I’m okay with that. Sometimes, it does feel like a little too much, but the important thing is that it gives me the opportunity to control how I let people in, and how much. I think of other models and actresses, even ten years ago, who only had journalists and paparazzi to tell the world who they are—they didn’t have a way to dictate their own narrative; they had no power in their own image. So, even though there’s a lot of shit that comes with social media, I’m pretty grateful to have it.

Stylist's own suit.

That’s a really interesting point. Especially someone like you, who is a model and actress—most of the time, the way you’re being presented to the world is through the eyes of another person, be it director, or photographer. So, social media allows you the chance to share yourself—whether it be through a bikini selfie or whatever—away from the male gaze.

Absolutely. To me, selfies are like, this weird little self-portrait where you’re gazing at yourself, which I think is really empowering. Obviously, I don’t think every selfie I post is a work of art, or some kind of political statement, but if you want me to get into it I will, because I do think there is something positive there. I mean, I get why everyone is like, ‘Oh this generation is full of narcissists,’ but listen, narcissism exists at every age and in every decade. Yes, now we have more tools than previous generations, and we’re all taking way more pictures, but does that make us any more self-obsessed? No. People have always been self-obsessed—that’s just human nature.

Right, and especially as women, where our bodies are constantly being objectified, politicized, subjugated, and we’re always being told how to walk, how to talk, how to stand… And you’re a model, so that takes those things to an even further extreme. So, taking control of how you’re presented, wearing whatever you want, posing however you want—I’m sure that can be incredibly powerful.

Totally. As a model, you’re literally a mannequin. And I’m not a typical model. I know people are always like, ‘What do you mean?’ but I’m 5’7”, I’m four inches shorter than every girl on set, I have big boobs—I always saw that I was different and was constantly being told to change, or be a certain way, and I just felt like, ‘Fuck that.’ So, with Instagram, it really gave me this opportunity to almost make like, a magazine, about myself, and that made me happy—not because I was self-obsessed, but because it was a way of controlling my own image when the rest of the time, it was controlled by everyone else.

Because of those things, Instagram has become such a platform for women and through that, for feminism. But I think it’s also opened up a space for women to criticize each other—like, if you take too many selfies you’re ‘doing feminism wrong.’

Exactly! And that’s just so wild and insane to me, because the whole idea of feminism is liberation and doing whatever the fuck you want. Which is so wild cause the whole idea of feminism is liberation and doing whatever the fuck you want. It happened with second wave feminism, when there was a complete shift over porn, and it’s essentially an extension of that same argument. Like, can you be a prostitute, or a sex worker, or take a bunch of selfies, and also a feminist? My answer is absolutely.

You can be a housewife and believe in equality, just like you can be super religious and still believe in a woman’s right to choose. My message is that simple. So, when women start policing what makes someone a feminist? That’s when I think we’ve really lost the plot. Isn’t that what we’re supposed to be fighting against?

There’s really just no right and wrong to me—especially for young women. The rest of culture is always telling us what we should and shouldn’t do—not only what we should look like, but what we should do with our lives—and instead of having women support women and whatever their choices are, they’re putting each other down and giving them something else to worry about. We’re all ingrained with these crazy misogynistic patriarchal tendencies, but if a woman still feels empowered, despite the negative influences in her life, we should never reject her. It’s like, yeah, I’m wearing a thong, and maybe that dates back to some fucked up anti-woman shit from the past, but now, I like wearing one and it makes me feel good. So, cool. We should celebrate that.

Do you remember when you first discovered feminism?

I was really young. My mom was an academic and she was always talking about feminism. But it didn’t really occur to me what it meant to be a woman until I was 15, which was way after I hit puberty and all the traditional physical signs of womanhood had occurred.

Stylist's own suit, shirt & tie.

You were 15 when you realized what it meant to be a woman—what does that mean?

My instinct at 13, despite having all this amazing rhetoric around feminism, was to still feel guilty and ashamed about myself and my body. It didn’t have to do with being female—it was about me, personally, and thinking that the world’s reaction towards me had nothing to do with sexism or culture. So, it took a minute for it to click where I was like, ‘Oh shit. That’s what mom was talking about, and this is an example of it.’ It felt incredibly liberating to realize that these reactions I was getting weren’t because I was weird, or something was wrong with me, but that there’s something wrong with our culture.

Do you feel like your feminism has almost been tokenized? Everything written about you in the press always refers to you as a ‘feminist model.’

It’s funny because it’s just always who I’ve been. Any of my high school boyfriends would tell you that. Before it was every cool, before I was ever modeling, before it was part of my professional life, feminism was something I believed in. So, when I broke out in this music video, which was directed and shot by women, all of the sudden people were asking, ‘Oh what do you think about it?’ and I was like, ‘Actually, I have a lot of things to say.’ But then no one actually wanted to hear it. Men were saying things like, ‘We’re not here to talk to you about your feminist ideas—we’re here to talk about you getting naked,’ and women were telling me, ‘You don’t have a license to talk about that.’ Of course, I wasn’t so surprised by the men’s reaction—but I was really surprised by the women. It’s really only been in the last five years that it’s been a complete change in attitude where everyone wants to talk to me about feminism and is not surprised by it, even if they think that my perspective is controversial.

But why? What about your perspective is controversial?

I really don’t know. I’ve had people say to me, ‘How do you expect people to take you seriously?’ That’s the line I get a lot. Like, ‘If you want to be a serious actress, you need to stop dressing like you do.’ It’s something I’ve been dealing with forever. So now, I’m just over it. I’m just going to keep doing me.

I get it.

There’s a crazy amount of compensating that we do as women for almost everything. In the past, whenever I met boyfriend’s families—and their moms in particular—I would always dress a certain way and be so scared to offend them. It’s like, why am I even thinking about this? What’s going to offend them? It’s just my body. If I don’t want to wear a giant t-shirt because I don’t think it’s flattering on me, then I shouldn’t have to. And it’s not just our bodies. I know every woman can relate to this. No matter what it is, there’s always that moment in your life where you realize, ‘Oh shit. People really don’t want to hear me talk,’ and actually think they’re being nice by telling me to quiet down. It took me a really long time to learn that it was okay to keep talking, to dress how I wanted. I mean, I’m 27 years old and I’m still learning—I still find myself apologizing or blaming myself rather than this larger cultural problem.

Stylis't own suit (left); stylist's own shirt & tie (right).

Does that ever get discouraging, though?

Yeah. I mean, absolutely. There’s moments where I think, ‘Thi is really not working and I’m really tired of this.’ But then there are the other moments where you feel like you’re finally doing it right and people get it. It’s just a constant battle we can never stop fighting. You take hits, but you keep moving forward, no matter what.

Do you feel pressure when certain things happen to speak publicly about them? Like with the Kavanaugh hearings—I know you were really vocal and went to D.C. and protested. But when certain things happen do you feel almost like you have to say or do something, because people expect you to? Or like you have to be political?

That’s really one of the problems with social media in the political age. So many people are posting stuff because they feel like they have to, when they don’t even know the specifics of the matter. People read a headline and think, ‘Oh shit, three people posted about that thing,’ so now I have to. I’m really, really anti that. And I know people get mad when I say things like this, but I really believe that’s the problem with the left. There’s a lot of surface level political correctness and being aware, but not actually talking about large ideas and tangible change. That really bothers me.

So, yes, do I have moments where I’m like, ‘Is this something I should jump on?’ Of course. But then I think, ‘Wait, what is the idea behind this? What are we talking about? What’s the change we’re looking for and how we can make it happen? Or is this just a hot tagline that makes people feel like I’m an activist?’ In the end, I just can’t do it, even if it’s going to make people leave angry comments on my page, because it feels so inauthentic. That’s why I don’t really do a ton of charity stuff, other than Planned Parenthood. Trust me, I care about the environment and a ton of other things. But in my mind, the way we actually create change is by dedicating our voices, and our time, and our passion, to one important thing at a time—instead of giving just a little bit to everything.

That’s why people who post stuff like ‘Call your senator!’ bother me. I mean, of course, it’s important to call your senator with some things, but am I really supposed to talk to this white male and hope that that phone call is enough to change his mind? That’s not how things were done in the ‘60s. That’s not revolution. Yeah, sometimes you can call your fucking senator, but you can also vote him out. That’s like, with the Kavanaugh hearings, a bunch of right wing assholes were commenting all over the internet like, ‘Oh she found another photo-op.’ At first, I found it so offensive because it’s against everything I stand for. But then, I sat back and thought, ‘Well maybe that’s okay,’ because a lot of people ended up actually seeing that photo, and what else am I supposed to do on a visual platform? I put a statement underneath and said very clearly how I felt, and in my mind, I think that’s probably better than calling your senator.

We have to be able to have real conversations about these things, and without policing everyone’s language. We have to be able to speak constructively, and there have to be a lot of different voices. That’s why I continue to ride for my perspective on feminism, even though I don’t think it’s that wild, other people do, and that’s because I’m like, ‘Good. Fuck you all. We need to have a conversation about what this is—especially for young women.’

We’ve talked a lot about your perspective on feminism, but what actually is it? How do you do feminism?

I mean, it’s literally the power to choose. Whatever you want to wear, however you want to present yourself, whatever your profession wants to be—you should not be judged on how you use your body, or don’t use your body, as a woman. It should be completely separate.

I have all of these women who comment on my bikini photos saying, ‘But you’re playing into some male ideal!’ I’m just like, ‘Well, I don’t give a shit what men think.’ First of all, this is what my god given body is, and second, sorry, it’s fun, in the same way that any sex positive, body positive thing should be. Yeah, I have a bunch of guys who say that they’re jerking off to me, but that’s not my problem. If I was going to build my life based off of how men respond to me, that would be awful. But also, I understand the first step of how it appeals to men, and this ideal of beauty, and the over-sexualization of women, but what if that’s just what I look like—and if I’m having fun with it.

Like you said, you’re really specific about what you decide to talk about politically. So, what made it so important for you to protest Kavanaugh?

I was sure he was going to get confirmed either way, whether I showed up or not, but that wasn’t the point. I think in the era of #MeToo, it’s incredibly important to stand up and support other women, and show people that even if we can’t change things right away, we can keep showing up, keep being loud, and eventually, we’ll change everything.

Do you think that in a post #MeToo environment fashion has changed? What about your day-to-day interactions on social media?

No. I mean, in certain ways, yes. I was talking to another magazine the other day and they were like, ‘Isn’t it great that the new BMI and age limits at fashion shows have changed?’ But still, all of the biggest up and coming models are under 18 and do not have a healthy BMI. Just because people have said they’re going to be more diverse, or more careful, or whatever, doesn’t mean they’re actually implementing those changes. Honestly, I was really sad leaving Paris Fashion Week this season. The thing I’ve always loved about fashion is expressing myself and empowering myself, and choosing how I’m gonna be that day—that’s what makes fashion so cool. But being there, and seeing that so many of the clothes are not made for real women… I don’t know. I love fashion and I see it as art, and I appreciate it in that way—but it’s also like, where are the women? In all of the industries I’m involved in—Hollywood, fashion, whatever—they’re very aware of #MeToo, but I still don’t see women being brought into leadership positions. I’m not talking about just being hired—I’m talking about having actual power.

People forget—women haven’t even had the vote for a hundred years. And I get it, we’ve come up as millennials and we’ve seen this amazing growth—we live in a very different world than my mom grew up in. But that said, I think it’s really important to remember what a short amount of time this has happened in—this female revolution—and that we’re still very much in the middle of a battleground. That’s why it’s so important to show up, and get arrested, and get people’s attention.

Do you think that right now, that’s especially important?

Yes and no. It’s always important. But it does feel more important now because look who’s in power. When you go to D.C.—and I recommend everyone does—you realize that this is not a government for the people. It’s really important to be disenfranchised by the government and to be really angry instead of just gutted by that fact, and to find ways to change it. And instead of calling your senator or actively participating in our system, let’s talk about how we can change it completely. I know that sounds really insane to some, but people need to remember how our country was founded. They were a bunch of crazy rebels. After Trump was elected, I was the first person to feel like, ‘I should give up. What else can I do?’ I was so uncomfortable with the word activist, I was so uncomfortable with what it means to be political. But now I’m like, ‘Fuck it. Let’s burn this shit down. Let’s go for it.’

We were talking about the Kavanaugh hearings, and how everyone on the internet was saying you used it as a photo-op. But really, everything I read about that day was about the fact that you weren’t wearing a bra. It was crazy.

It was 90 degrees that day. I was so uncomfortably warm in jeans, everyone was in the hot sun feeling so hot—even that tank top even felt like I was wearing a lot. People were yelling at me to put on a bra, and I couldn’t understand it, because if that’s the only thing you see in this whole picture, then we have some issues we need to deal with beyond Kavanaugh being confirmed. Like, why is this the conversation that people are having? You can find a lot of really cool pictures of women in the ‘60s wearing all kinds of shit—bra, no bra—but who cares? They’re women. They’re saying something. Listen to them.

But does all the attention on the way you look make you feel like people aren’t listening?

It just makes me feel discouraged sometimes, and I start to feel like, ‘What’s the point?’ I get so sick of this fucking intense ridicule and people missing the point. So many people said, ‘Oh my god, you intentionally got arrested?’ But didn’t you never take a history class? Political action is intentionally getting arrested. It’s not for a photo-op—it’s an act of resistance.

It feels right; it feels honest; it feels true to myself, as cheesy and cliché as that sounds. There’s a lot of things in my life that I don’t necessarily feel like are honest to who I am, and it’s actually a pleasure to engage in something that does, and feels more important than just my life or my career.

In your work, because you have to play different roles, do you feel like you do things that aren’t true to who you are?

I mean, the truth is, as an actor, you’re not the director, you’re not the editor—you’re not putting it together. You’re a piece in the puzzle. As women, I find in general, that that happens a lot—you’re the mannequin in someone else’s vision. That’s what I like about social media, and about having my own company.

I recently interviewed another actress, and we talked a lot about the same stuff. I asked her if she was angry, because she really sounded like she is. But you don’t. How is that possible?

I mean, I am angry—I think that anger is healthy. If you’re not more than a little angry, you should be. No matter who you are in this country.

Unless you’re a rich, white guy.

No, even then—a culture of sexism, racism, classism—that impacts everybody, even white males, and makes them all kinds of fucked up. So, I think everyone should be angry. That’s what I say about feminism in general, too—it’s bad for men, it’s bad for women, it’s bad for queer people. It’s bad for everybody. That's why we have to keep working to change things. We have to ask ourselves, 'How do we proceed? What can I do to make the world different?' And hoonestly, even if that, for me, just means changing one girl's mind, and having her feel just a little bit more okay with herself, that's more than enough more for me. So, I think that hope, and inspiration, is what pushes me through anger and makes me want to never stop fighting.